Baked Eggs with Mushrooms and Tomato-Pesto Toasts

I made some delicious baked eggs for lunch when I got home from shopping in the arctic winds today. (It's not really that cold, but the wind is making it feel that way.)

This is today's and tomorrow's lunch (except for the toasts, which are today's only, of course). It's kind of half-way between a frittata recipe I frequently use and one for baked eggs with morel mushrooms that I've got in this little French cookbook I bought recently. The toasts are also a variation on a recipe from the book, called... what is it called? How to Forget your Ex with the stab of your fork.

The reason I bought the book, which is in translation, is not that I've got someone to forget, but that all the recipes are for single serving dishes and I have a deep love of anyone who will provide me with recipes I don't have to adjust. (Though I did adjust this recipe up for making tomorrow's lunch.)

Here's a recipe, for two:

200 g baby potatoes, cut in quarters
2 bay leaves
salt and pepper
100 g button mushrooms, cut in quarters
seasoning salt or an herb blend
1 garlic clove, crushed or diced or whatever
1-2 tsp canola/olive oil
3 eggs
2 tsp sour cream (or crème fraiche, though I've never used that - can't find it here)

Preheat oven to 425F/ 315C.

Boil the potatoes with bay leaves and some salt until just cooked through. Meanwhile, sauté the mushrooms in a little oil (I didn't measure, but it was less than 1 tbsp) with garlic and seasoned with salt and pepper or a seasoning salt/spice mix.

Butter or spray a small oven-proof dish. When potatoes and mushrooms are cooked, pour into the buttered dish. Crack three eggs over top, taking care not to break the yolks. Spoon sour cream onto the mixture, between the egg yolks. Cover dish with tin foil.

Bake until set the way you like them. The original recipe, which was for a single egg with mushrooms but no potatoes - I added potatoes to make it more substantial for lunch at work - suggested 5 minutes but my whites weren't even started to set by that point. I removed the tin-foil at 12 minutes, at which point the whites were pretty much set, though the yolks were still very runny. (If you tap on them, they're very jiggly.) Eight to ten minutes later, they looked as they do in the photo - the edges of the yolk were starting to lighten up a little bit and when tapped they still had some movement, but not nearly so much as earlier.

I'd have probably used more mushrooms than I did and fewer potatoes, except that the mushrooms I bought yesterday froze on the way home from work and so I had to use a couple of slightly aged (but not gone bad) ones I'd bought on Saturday.


For the toasts, to serve 1:

3 thin slices of baguette or a bun of some sort
a little olive oil, to brush over
3 thin wedges of tomato
1-1.5 tsp pesto
1 tsp Parmesan cheese, grated

Lightly brush olive oil over slices of bread. Toast in the still-hot oven after removing the eggs. Top with a slice of tomato, a dab of pesto (I didn't measure, but it was likely less than a 1/2 tsp per toast), and a sprinkle of cheese. Grate over pepper/salt if you wish.